Donna Tartt

In the decade since her first book, she has
published exactly two novels, but Donna Tartt took the literary
world by storm in 1992 when the publicity surrounding the release
of The Secret History came close to overshadowing the novel
itself, which depicts the murder of a student at a small college
in Vermont by his fellow Greek classics classmates.

The title of Tartts first
novel also is a fair description of her own attitude toward press
interviews. She was born in 1963 in Greenwood, Mississippi, the
elder of two daughters born to Don and Taylor Tartt, but she grew
up in Grenada, Mississippi, on the eastern edge of the Delta. Details
from her formative years are scant, but she appears to have been
a precocious child with an early love for literatureshe wrote
her first poem at age five, published her first sonnet in a Mississippi
literary review at thirteen.

In the fall of 1981, she entered
the University of Mississippi in Oxford as a freshman, where one
of her stories caught the attention of Willie
Morris, then a writer-in-resident at the university. Finding
her in the Holiday Inn bar one evening, Morris said to her, “My
name is Willie Morris, and I think youre a genius.”

Upon Morris recommendation, Barry
Hannah (also a writer-in-resident at the university) admitted
Tartt as a freshman into his graduate short story course where,
Hannah says, she outperformed the graduate students. At the urging
of Morris and others, Tartt transferred after her freshman year
from Ole Miss to Bennington
College, a small liberal arts college in Vermont, where she
made friends with novelists Bret
Easton Ellis and Jill Eisenstadt. During her second year at
Bennington, she began writing The Secret History.

Tartt began showing her novel soon
after she began writing it to Ellis, one of the two people to whom
the novel is dedicated. It was through Ellis that Tartt and her
as-yet-unfinished novel were introduced to literary agent Amanda
Urban, who accepted Tartt as an unsigned client. Two years later,
Urban was able to stir up a bidding war among publishers for the
866-page manuscript; the winner was Knopf, who paid a massive $450,000
for the book and ordered a 75,000-copy first-printing (compared
to about 10,000 copies that most first novels get). Even so, demand
for the book was so tremendous that Knopf had to order unprecedented
additional printings. The novel remained on the Publishers Weekly
bestseller list for thirteen weeks, reaching as high as number two.

Bennington College in Vermont was the model for the fictional college
in Donna Tartt's debut novel, The Secret History

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for
several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
He'd been dead for ten days before they found him, you know. It was
one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont historystate troopers,
the FBI, even an army helicopter; the college closed, the dye factory
in Hampden shut down, people coming from New Hampshire, upstate New
York, as far away as Boston.

from
The Secret History

The Secret
History takes place at the fictional Hampden College, which
like Bennington is a small liberal arts college in Vermont. Its
story centers on a small group of overly refined and elite students
of ancient Greek taught by an eccentric professor who accepts few
students. When the narrator, Richard Papen, a penniless transfer
student from suburban California, successfully hatches a scheme
to join the group, he gradually becomes privy to the group's secret
history: they had accidentally murdered a farmer in their successful
attempt to recreate an ancient Greek bacchanal. However,
Bunny Corcorran, the one member of the group who had not participated
in the bacchanal, learns of the murder and begins to blackmail the
others. As Bunny's sanity becomes questionable and he threatens
to reveal their secret, Richard must choose whether to side with
the group in their decision to murder Bunny in order to silence
him.

Critical opinion of the novel has
been mostly favorable. Some critics have faulted The Secret History
for vapid characterization and artificial stylization, but most
have praised the work as an outstanding achievement for a first
novel. Variously interpreted as suspenseful mystery, an exploration
of the nature of evil, and a comparison of classical and modern
values and philosophy, The Secret History is a noteworthy
debut from a talented contemporary author.

With the publication of The Little
Friend in 2002, Tartt proves she is no one-hit wonder. Already
critics have praised the novel for its prose style, sharp characterizations,
and tense narrative.